maze in the dark
by icecreamlova
Summary: Aino Minako and nostalgia, for what once used to be. You cannot survive on memories. They ambush you instead.


Memory was a strange thing, slippery like an iceblock, nowhere near as pleasant. You couldn't survive on memories. You couldn't survive on iceblocks either, but they were sweet, crunchy, and brain freeze was nothing compared to being walloped with a vision while walking down the road, and forgetting where you were - up until someone stumbled into you because you'd stopped so suddenly.

The first week after Ace's final moments had been awful, the floodgates to her memories newly open, phantom visions dancing in the corner of her eye. She spent at least three afternoons staying behind to clean the classroom, and not because she had been irrevocably delayed rescuing the city, and therefore arrived late.

Minako coped, obviously, because she was amazing and no rush of memory could keep her down, and bemoaned the utter cruelty of the world - no one would have made Sailor V stay behind. Artemis, that mean cat, wouldn't let her transform to make her work faster, either, no matter how much she argued that getting it done quickly would leave time for more important things.

"You spend all your time in the Arcade anyway!" Artemis howled.

Minako stuck her tongue out at him. "I'm training! Besides, the Moon Princess might just visit one day!"

Artemis twitched his tail imperiously. "Princess Serenity was graceful and ladylike, unlike certain humans in this room. She'd find arcades appalling."

Serenity had almost given away half the secret corridors in the Moon Palace because her laughter had been too loud, trying to escape through them to visit Earth, and hadn't been apologetic about it. Minako remembered that much. She suspected Artemis remembered it, too.

After that, the rush eased into a trickle, and visions turned into moments of déjà vu that struck at the oddest times, instead.

Life wasn't so different, really, except sometimes she'd walk through a lane of ginkgo trees, boughs lush and heavy with leaves, and remember a tall boy with the palest hair who had always been on the edge of a fight - and the memory wouldn't stop there. The boy would turn into an older man, battle-worn, closed off, trained fighters in his wake instead of teenaged gang members. The man's face was shadowed, and Minako would have thought those memories thin and unreliable, except she remembered - vividly - how his lips felt, brushing the back of her hand as he whispered a greeting.

If she closed her eyes, she could almost feel his breath against her skin. It had made her entire body flush, once. When she opened her eyes, she pressed a fist to her chest, then kept walking.

And when she dashed through a hedge maze in the dark, chasing a thief who'd had the impression that her speed was limited to dancing across rooftops, she'd wonder if the maze looked just a bit too familiar. If the excitement rushing through her veins was the only reason she expected a hand to shoot out and close around her wrist, and drag her into a dark corner and-

Okay, that was _definitely_ not the adrenaline. She hadn't had a good look at the thief, but on a scale of Amano to Detective Wakagi, he was way closer to an Amano.

That night, after handing the thief safely into custody, Minako dreamed of Earth, of following Princess Serenity down the moonbeams, trying to run her down in rows of hedges. She dreamed of a voice in the dark, deep and quiet with the weight of a promise; the curl of something green and hot in the pit of her belly; running her hands through hair longer, finer, paler than even hers, dragging his face closer until their breaths mingled... then darting past him into the clearing where a couple was embracing.

"You always did fight dirty," the man said to her some indeterminate time afterwards, the faintest smile in his voice, and she was annoyed that he could still string words together.

"Like you don't leave your honour on the battlefield," she said, shifting her hand across his hip.

Minako woke with a start.

His face stayed shadowed, and his name just out of reach. Oh cruel world. Minako wanted to see who it was that featured in her rather pleasant dreams.

She dreamed, and she fought, and she found Serenity - missing piece slipping into place inside her - and she did not remember his face. Until she saw it again.

Watching as her Senshi fought one of the Dark Kingdom generals not fifty meters from the shambles of Princess D's masquerade ball - Nephrite, something whispered - she'd grinned when they chased his spirit from the Princess's form. She'd been about to step back into the shadows and leave, until something rippled in the distance, a tug in her navel as power gathered.

Three of those faces brought jolts of memory. The fourth, that silver hair streaming behind him, pronouncing his allegiance to the Dark Kingdom, brought something more.

_I'm a servant to the Great Ruler._

"Kunzite," she whispered in the shadows, too quiet to be heard. Her hands formed fists.

And Minako remembered, with clarity she hadn't known was missing from her visions, the very last time she'd seen him. On the moon, surrounded by bodies bleeding out, the scorched dust crystalising around her, he had said the very same thing before something sharp and icy plunged into her side.

Now she knew.

That voice, those hands - of course. Who else could it have belonged to?

Minako closed her eyes. She had wanted so badly to know.

If only she had remembered back then, in those good old days, because now she just wanted to forget.


End file.
